Time.

We have time.
But we don’t take it.

Time is all we have.
Everything else leaves or changes.
Possessions, clouds, sunsets, pets, jobs, keys, places we were, hands we touched, empires we build along with castles in the sand will go away, change, dissolve, or cease to exist including our bodies.

“His time was up” they say when a man dies.
Maybe he left and took his time with him.

Time is the nod from God we receive to go forward. With time we separate like a soap bubble from the hoop in a child’s hand. We drift, we float into a universe with an unspecified mission. The blank ticket we hold in our hand says “Free Choice” and nothing more, and there is no expiration date.

Time is all I have. So I take time and do something with it. As I sat in to play music with my friends, Dave and Jason tonight in a local establishment, I suddenly had the experience of being in a movie, now watching the same scene I was in, but from a seat in a movie theater. The camera showed me and Dave in the foreground, the bar, some patrons and couples at nearby tables. I said to Dave that if we were watching this movie we would look at this scene expecting something to happen, a story to develop. Perhaps we would try to figure out who the people in the scene were and how they fit in.

We posses the best cameras ever developed, two in fact, called eyes. They are hig-def, 3D, with tracking and stabilizing abilities. Yet, we look at things that are not real – like film and television and screens – with greater attention than things that occur right in front of us. They “entertain” us well. Inter-tame us perhaps. The human brain gives priority to things that change until they are figured out. It has kept us safe on many occasions, but learning information takes time and attention, and information is grossly overrated as a hedge against bad things happening.

We have not seen this movie before. I think God – however you define an intelligence far beyond mortal brains, the He/She/It/We/Them/That that put this entire universe together – has no idea what we will do over time. We get time to interact and to explore and live in the human experience, and we have free choice. I believe we are born in one moment, in a similar way to a passenger jumping onto a moving train and suddenly finding him or herself in a completely new environment, but still on his/her own time.

Over time everything created will disappear. Nothing we call “real” will come with us when we die. Is “reality” real without us? To realize something is to have a cognitive experience. The tree in the forrest has not fallen until someone sees it on the ground. Then it also made a sound. It is us re-cognizing something’s presence that makes it real.

Music enabled many unsuspecting patrons of a bar in Solvang to experience time with like-souls and hearts. It was in real-time, 3D, binaural audio, fully immersed and interactive and we all had a great time. Some had no clue of the virtuosity, presence and enormity of the moments we shared, but it now resides in their hearts in the form of a melody they can’t forget.

Anyway.
I had some time, and I thought about it.
My suggestion: Take some time today aside from tasks and do what you love the most.